Skyward + Heretto

Challenge

Skyward is a significant provider of education management software. Their products include management and learning tools for individual classrooms and a full suite of tools for managing school district operations, including finance, human resources, physical assets, and more. 

Skyward was missing product release deadlines. The company had transitioned to an agile software development process that accelerated update release schedules and exposed significant problems with existing processes for creating, managing, and publishing content associated with the software.

There was now little time to create and review the extensive content revisions required for each release. Content was being developed by multiple groups working independently, resulting in inconsistent style and redundancy, with no easy way to reuse up-to-date content. An inefficient review and approval process was holding up timelines, resulting in product deadlines being missed.

Solution

After rigorous testing in a sandbox environment, Skyward chose Heretto. Now, a centralized content management team creates content in Heretto, sends it to SMEs for review, revises it based on SME feedback, and publishes it to various formats after the final review/edit process. 

The system offers: 

• Clean, easy-to-use, authoring interface.
• Customizable templates, content types, and workflow triggers. 
• Integration to MindTouch with an open API-based Universal Connector.
• Metadata use with a single source system, making it easy to find and reuse content.

“Heretto looks and feels ‘fresh,’ and it was important that the authors felt that they were using new technology. Maintenance is so easy now. It is such a substantial difference that I can’t even fathom the change for us.” Steve George, Manager of Content Management and Training

Results

Skyward’s documentation process is now significantly improved, delivering better quality within a more efficient workflow.

Here are some key results:

• A centralized, single-source documentation creation and delivery model is ideal for an agile environment.
• A responsive content team is totally in sync with Skyward’s development team, enabling them to have fully documented software at release.
• A highly efficient documentation workflow leverages the expertise of each contributor. Teams can comment and be notified of status updates as content moves through the process, making it easier to move topics from person to person.
• Skyward can now reuse 100% of content through a contextual help screen that displays links to related topics. Changes are instantly and automatically pushed to any reuse instance, eliminating version control issues.
• Skyward can now customize content based on each customer's state regulations and requirements, vastly improving the customer experience.